The ugly side of sports fields

I started a bit of a twitter storm by tweeting, inspired by spending the last few days at the Craven Week at Paarl Boys' High, a list of what I thought were the prettiest school grounds in the country.

Not everyone agreed with me, although I suspect there was some jingoism going on with old boys and parents struggling to see past the beauty of the fields they played on, or where they watch their children play these days.

It reminded me that some time ago I wrote a piece about the ugly grounds I've been forced to watch sport at. Here's an extract from it

I spent a week in December 2009 at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola cricket week in Benoni.

The Coke Week, as it is known, represents the pinnacle of achievement for schoolboy players and it is the envy of the other cricket-playing nations. None of them have the organisational capacity, and the dedication on the part of players and administrators to pull off a tournament of such size and standard, particularly not just before Christmas.

As I sat in the shade at the Willowmoore Park B ground drowsily watching the action I got to thinking of the venues that have hosted the event over the years. The pleasantness of the setting led me to remembering the ugliest cricket grounds I’ve ever watched games at – and I’ve been to a few in the course of my job.

There are some other contenders, but the honour of the ugliest of all goes to the Gelvandale Cricket Club in Port Elizabeth. I was there at the 2008 Coke Week when the Gauteng under-19 side played against KwaZulu-Natal.

Gelvandale is a “township” club, nothing wrong with that. And it occupies an illustrious spot in cricket history in this country. Many cricketing greats from the apartheid days played there, and honour and glory goes to those who are keeping the game alive there. But I wondered, why the boys from KES and St John’s, DHS and Kearsney have to spend one fifth of what was the highlight week of their cricketing lives so far, there?

To be kind, the ground slopes at about 10 degrees, north to south, and has doesn’t have much of what most people would call grass. It is flanked on one side by an electricity distribution station and the southern boundary is the fence of the local cemetery – one wag among the spectators wondered out loud which was worse, Eskom or the graveyard - they both had the stench of death about them.

Then there was the real stench, wafting in from a local sewage works and driving everyone into their cars with the windows up, in the heat and humidity.

There have been some other awful settings, often in places where you expect better. I remember the week in Stellenbosch where, instead of playing in a lovely setting among the vines, the players were expected to be inspired on a ground belonging to one of the distillers, surrounded by railway carriages and empty packing crates, all underlain by that smell of stale booze that you get in a pub at opening time (I’m told).

And a few years ago in Potchefstroom there were games at the local mental hospital. The wicket was great but some of the spectators were disconcerting, to say the least.

A few years ago when the week was in Johannesburg matches were played on beautiful fields at St David’s, at the Wanderers club and at St John’s College. In keeping with tournament tradition, however, the boys also travelled to Kagiso and Alex and Soweto where, if the idea was to show them the ugliness of the other side, it certainly worked.

Willowmoore Park, despite its industrial revolution era concrete light pylons, doesn’t fall into the category of ugly cricket grounds. Sure, the main stadium is a bit barren and it’s Northern end abuts on the sleazier side of Benoni’s CBD, but go down to the B, C and D fields and you are transported into a charming rural setting: fields ringed by blue gums, and bordered by a vlei lined with the willow trees that the ground gets its name from.

Conventional wisdom about the Khaya Majola Week (and its rugby counterpart, the Craven Week) is that the best ones are held in the smaller towns. The 2009 week in Benoni was one of those, and all within sight of the ugly big city.

The 2018 Craven Week in Paarl is turning out to be one of those too, and the Brug Street ground at Paarl Boys' High has as spectacular a view as you could hope for.